I like the stackexchange approach, where upvotes count 10x for karma, because no matter how obviously wrong and indecent, we still care for the share of good an

I like the stackexchange approach, where upvotes count 10x for karma, because no matter how obviously wrong and indecent, we still care for the share of good answers, and more fine grained controls may take care of the rest (sometimes manually). This isn't perfect, 1:10 is an arbitrary proportion, and it might give a wrong impression of being succesfull, and take too long to register as a downward slope; but very importantly, this detaches voting on content that is still immediately visible from karma, that is immediately personal and maybe not that important to other users. I had a funny incident, where I misunderstood a comment, thinking that "all your answers are negative" was very true, because I often disagree and try to be contrarian. SE has a policy that discourages discussion, so if users find it uncomfortable having their views challenged, when they really wanted an easy answer, howbeit simplistic, that may be lawful. The situation is different when discoussion is the aim of the game. And it's a bit disingenious to say that SE doesn't have "discussion"; rather, they avoid controversy, heated arguments, or open ended debate. Anyhow, regarding your comment that downvoting is terrible for civil discours, I agree inasmuch as it's often hard to tell what the downvote signalizes, as it might lump up many different opinions into one false agreement. Say, five different opinions compete, but only one takes on all of the answers and will accrue downvotes for the attacks, whereas the others get basicly ignored by competitors for being irrelevant, but yield feedback so that the vote is really one of popularity, as opposed to ... Really says something about diplomacy. And I hate it so much.